Italy says offloading of bank bad loans should not be too fast

VALLETTA, April 8 (Reuters) - Italy's finance minister said banks should be allowed to offload their bad loans in a "reasonable" time because selling too fast could hit their financial stability.

The European Central Bank has been pushing lenders with a high ratio of so-called non-performing loans (NPLs) to sell them, causing Italian banks to rush to offload their huge amount of bad loans which account for a quarter of the EU total of 1 trillion euros of bad loans.

Pier Carlo Padoan told reporters that he agreed with the ECB policy of stressing the NPLs problem in its supervisory role, but stressed that the sale should not go too fast. (Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; editigng by Jan Strupczewski; @fraguarascio)